.

Hopefully this helps you in your journey to incorporate new and exciting ways to add purpose to what your students are learning! 

Happy Teaching!

How is it already October?? Now that the school year has gotten into the swing of things, time seems to just fly by.

One of my favorite things in the world is handwritten letters. I love the personal touch they add. From the time they took to write the letter, to getting to see their handwriting, to the stationary, the sweet words in the letter - there is so much I love about them! This year, I decided to write letters to each family in my class. I've always thought about doing this. It seems like our conferences, which are in October, don't happen until the school year has been going for a while and I really wanted a way to let the parents know how things are going before then. 

I wasn't sure if all the effort would be that worth it in the end. For me, it was nice to reflect on each child. For the parents, they LOVED this! I got so many nice notes from the parents about how much the letters meant to them. I will definitely be doing this every year from now on! 

Favorite From Today #1

So last night, I had a spur of the moment "IDEA." My beginning of year lessons are so much "read book then do craft." I love this because the books all emphasize some type of life skill (persevering, working as a team) as so the students really get the foundation for starting the year but I just wanted something a little more exciting for our 2nd day. 

So, right after recess we headed to our campus IDEA lab (aka Makerspace lab)! Now, I typically do these types of lessons in my classroom but this space offers students the opportunity to use a green scree, drimel saw, 3-D printer, & more. So it is definitely a place we visit several times during the year and it's important they are introduced to the place. 

We began our lesson by reading this adorable book! It is absolutely PERFECT for these types of lessons! It talks about the entire process of creating a physical version of what you can imagine. After we came up with agreements about how people should behave in the idea lab, the students began to use materials such as paper towel rolls, tape, cups, pom-poms, etc. to make "The Most Magnificent Thing" they could think of!

I was SO IMPRESSED with their creativity & problem solving skills!! They made pom-pom bracelets, purses, baskets, pencil holders, binoculars, ships, and more! Just by trial and error, students learned that putting glue on one side of tape does not make tape stick to stuff but that rolling the tape allows both sides to be sticky! It was such a special day & definitely one of my favorites! Made me excited to go to teach that day! The students LOVED this too - the next day they all said "do we get to go back there today?!"

Favorite From Today #2

We also started our phonics unit by refreshing our knowledge of the alphabet. The students created this classroom alphabet - one of my favorite things to have up in my classroom! 

This might be one of my favorite years so far. I have LOVED how this school year has started and am super excited about the year to come!! 

Having such a great start to the year is definitely a group effort. A well prepared teacher, grateful parents, and responsive students are the keys to a spectacular year! Having such wonderful parents & students to engage with every day really makes me so even more thankful & excited to get to work with them for the next year! 

Starting this year with such a grateful heart makes me want to reflect on my favorite things from each day. 

My mom sending me flowers. This is a sweet tradition she does every year and every year I get so excited knowing they will come! 

Having one of my amazing teammates tell me about this adorable book at lunch and then reading it to my students right before we went to go look at the eclipse. Of course, we talked about what the eclipse really is & the students totally understood it - they were even able to show off to their parents what the words "umbra" & "punumbra" mean. What was adorable was when they all looked at the solar eclipse with their glasses on, they all said "Wow! It does look like something ate it!!" Is that the cutest thing or what?! 

Oh & having one of my sweet new firsties comment that he definitely did not think he was responsible enough to be able to be trusted to wear the glasses on his own. This was after he heard what can happen if the glasses were not worn correctly. Sweet thing. Having a student understand the idea of risk/reward on the first day of school makes me a grateful teacher! 

Having the students work on these puzzles. It really allowed for the 1st day to be very chill and let them have something sweet to take home at the end of the day to remember their 1st day by. 

Here's to 4 more posts this weekend because I just came up with the daily favorites idea...

It's that time of year again!! Back to School! 

I've been up at school for about 2 weeks now. It's so nice to actually get in the classroom before our work week actually starts so that I can spend that time re-moving into my classroom & organizing it/focus on the aesthetics. 

I like to spend a week to set up my classroom & work on a new project. It's too much to do everything all at once & I like to spend each year adding something new to my classroom. 

Honestly, the first 3 years, I didn't have too much energy to devote to the creative side of how my classroom should look. I was just focused on the logistical aspect and making sure I had amazing lessons/activities to do with my students...because after all, it is about what they are doing all day, not how pretty/cute their classroom actually looks.

My first 2 years, I changed the layout of my classroom a TON. It got to the point where a student finally asked "why do you keep moving things around?" Making sure that the space was used in the most purposeful way was {and still is} so important to me! 

The main decorative things that have remained basically same since are...

This sign on my classroom door! I made it my 1st year & absolutely LOVE it!! First, I put each students name on each crayon. Now I think it's way cuter {& easier to maintain ;)} to simply have blank crayons.

This back carpet area. 

My small group area and my teacher materials.

My calendar. 

I used to use the calendar pieces that came with the calendar set I bought. I wanted to make my calendar time more purposeful though so I made my own calendar pieces. 

Last year, my project was painting the walls blue - which I am obsessed with. 

I went to Michaels and picked out different scrapbook paper & made a template to create the pennant. I hot glued the pieces to the curling ribbon. I absolutely love it!! 

AND 

adding a cute nook for students to work at. 

AND

redo-ing my classroom library...which is still a work in progress... I'm working on getting all the correctly colored bins and making sure everything is labeled.

THIS year, I updated my hallway bulletin board...and I am OBSESSED!  

I just LOVE it!

A big thank you to The Happy Teacher's Palette & Jennifer at The Craft Patch for the tutorials & templates for these flowers!! They are absolutely perfect!! And I am so appreciative to one of my co-workers for the grass idea, I think it just really tops it off!

Here's to a great year!! 

Today was a day my firsties have been waiting for since the first week of school - Reading Buddies!! Finally we got to meet our 4th grade reading buddies! Both the 4th graders & 1st graders have been begging to meet their buddies so it was a happy day for all. 

In the past, my first graders meet with their reading buddies every other week.  However, this year schedules were hard so we are meeting once a month.  

If you have never done reading buddies before I would HIGHLY encourage you to reach out to another teacher at your school!! Not only do reading buddies promote a love for reading & practice read aloud skills, it also fosters an amazing community and helps bring the students of all grade levels, and school as a whole together! In fact, today one of my firsties was a little sad because his reading buddy from Kinder was in the class and he didn't get paired with him.  When he realized that he could still go up to his old buddy and say "Hi, it is nice to see you! How are you?" AND he could now get the opportunity to meet another person - he was so excited! Learning the social skill of being able to interact with people who you may not have seen in a while is so important!  

Today for our 1st reading buddies day, we made miniature versions of ourselves.  Since I have only taught 1st I was a little nervous that the 4th graders would finish super quickly or not be into the activity - they were SO excited! It even worked out perfectly because some of them had to make 2 (more 1st graders than 4th graders = some 4th graders having 2 buddies)  in the  (something that both the 1st graders & 4th graders really enjoyed!!). Thank goodness ;)

...I've got my sister, mom, dad, and me!

Not the right lyrics? Well, they work for this post ;)

Today we learned about families.

We started out by reading this precious book...

Then we talked about what a relative is and what families are.  We discovered that a family is a group of people that come together because of a common bond and family is made up of people who love and care for you.  

The students then shared with each other what their family looks like.  This was such a fun activity! We loved seeing all the different families - some with just immediate families, some including cousins, adopted families, etc! 

When my teammate did this, she had the students write "_____'s family" rather than "my family."  I am definitely going to do that next year.  

Today was the day my group of firsties have been waiting for! Class Jobs day! We spent the day filling out applications to see if we can get "approved" for these jobs.  The room let out cheers when we were all approved to help with our class jobs.

You can get the free printable by clicking on the picture above! Enjoy :)

...and as cute as can be!

I thought I would spend some time this evening writing about one of my FAVORITE things in my classroom...

Not only do I LOVE the aesthetics of this and that it creates a child friendly feel right when you look at the front of the classroom...

There are SO MANY academic benefits (which makes it even more heavenly!!)

This activity accompanies my ABC order lessons which is perfect because any time the students are working on something related to ABC order OR something that they need a reminder of letter-sound relationships, they immediately think to look at our classroom alphabet.  I noticed this year (the first year I added this to my classroom) that the amount of students who use this tool has really increased.

I also teach this when teaching my math unit of Sorting & Organizing to connect how things in our world can be organized (ABC order).

Back to school season is literally flying by! Last week was so busy I ran out of time to take pictures of all the fun things we were doing.

Since I kept a lot of what I was doing the same as last year, I thought I would share that post...

It's the last week of July, which means our classrooms will be ready to get into in {hopefully} a week.  Since I will be spending a lot of time simply organizing the classroom and working on Meet The Teacher things, I thought I would get ahead and complete some gifts.

I just found out that one of my dearest college friends will be entering the world of teaching this year! I am so excited for her and created a little care package to help welcome her! 

Notepad: Walmart

Notecards: Target Dollar Section

Frame: IKEA

Subway Art: Hope King's Classroom Quotes

Next Up...

One of my most treasured school memories was my 2nd grade birthday.  My teacher, Mrs. Yates, had a way of making each child feel incredibly special, especially on their birthday.  When you walked into the classroom on your birthday she would have a HUGE green sheet of butcher paper hanging up on the chalkboard {yes, chalkboard...does anyone even have one of those anymore?!} with the words "Happy Birthday ____" written on it.  During the morning everyone would have a chance to go sign the birthday card and it would hang up until the end of the day.

In addition, she would bake each child their own mini CAKE {think top layer of wedding cake size}.  I mean, WHAT?! I remember thinking how thoughtful that was.  I always dreamed of doing the same for my students when I became a teacher.

{She may have done the typical birthday crown & pencil too but I remember the poster & cake standing out the most.}

Fast forward many years later & while I dream of baking each child their own cake, I'm a little cautious with my district's nutrition rules...so instead, here's how I celebrate my student's birthdays!

Birthday Bananas!

How hilarious are those?! I stumbled upon them from Caffeinated Conclusions and knew I just had to incorporate them into our birthday celebrations.   

You can get labels for the birthday bananas here.  

Birthday Banner

Birthday Crown & Goodie Bag

Birthday Morning Work
On birthday mornings, each student works on a birthday themed morning work activity.  

You can get the birthday crown here.

Now I am off to celebrate the last few remaining days of summer!